Dark Portrait of a 'Painter of Light' - Los Angeles Times

by kate | March 8, 2006 at 12:24 pm

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I love that someone is getting on Thomas Kinkade's case. I can't decide which I like better - the image of Kinkade wasted in Las Vegas heckling Siegfried & Roy, or urinating on a statue of Winnie the Pooh and shouting "This one's for you Walt!".

The other part in this article that I really like is when one of Kinkade's "gallery owners" is quoted as saying " It's mainstream art, not art you have to look at to try to understand..."

It's not just Kinkade's business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he's built his empire.

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.